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MEMBER DIARY

God save the (Congressman) King!

If you do one thing today to help save our country, please make it a phone call to your Congressperson to tell him/her to support Congressman Peter King’s hearings on homegrown Islamic terrorism in the U.S. and the radicalization of the U.S. Muslim community by jihadists and sharia promoters. (Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121.) Or go to your congressman’s website, http://xxx.house.gov, where xxx is your representative’s last name, and email them a message.

Here’s a visual example of why these hearings are so necessary — a screenshot of the CAIR site taken in January 2011 (the image has since been taken down, under protest):

With people like CAIR encouraging Muslims to stonewall law enforcement, it’s no wonder that

[c]ops and federal agents agree with Rep. Pete King that they don’t get a lot of tipsters from the Muslim community – but they say that’s true of many other communities.

Counterterrorism and intelligence sources from the NYPD and FBI say law enforcement faces the same problem with the Mafia, drug cartels and the MS-13 gang.[Doesn't it make you feel better about Muslim groups to hear them compared to...MS-13?!!]

“Criminals are criminals. It gets dicier because Muslim extremists wrap their work in religion, but the smokescreens, the silence and intimidation are similar,” an FBI source said.

“What’s different is the risk — the extent of the damage, the number of innocent people who can be hurt.”

King has outraged many Muslim-Americans by convening hearings into homegrown radical Islamists and claiming the community has stonewalled terror investigations.

If King is outraging people, he’s probably doing something right. But the pressures he must be facing are enormous. And for some reason — either ignorance, appeasement, or some combination of the two — King has assembled a line of witnesses that is rather disappointing. From Investors Business Daily:

The New York Republican [Peter King] blames the Council on American-Islamic Relations for creating a backlash against his hearings. Yet his Thursday curtain-raiser is bookended by witnesses who are staunch allies of CAIR, a group so shady the FBI director has blackballed it from outreach.

As House Homeland Security Committee chairman, King is giving a Muslim politician — Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. — first turn at the witness-table mike. Ellison, who’s spoken at several CAIR fundraisers, has already tried to discredit the hearings as “a witch hunt.”

Worse, King gives the last word to someone who threatens to undermine his most explosive charge — that the Muslim community is not cooperating with law enforcement. That final witness, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, claims Muslims have been “pivotal” in fighting terror.

“I don’t know what King is hearing,” said Baca, who’s also appeared at CAIR fundraisers. If he “has evidence of noncooperation, he should bring it forward.”

That will be tough: King has impaneled none of the “cops or FBI agents on the ground” who he insists have been telling him “every day” that Muslims are withholding information. Without them, Baca threatens to steal the headlines.

CAIR’s L.A. chapter is listed on the sheriff’s website as a partner. Among other things, CAIR gives mandatory two-hour Islamic “sensitivity training” to new cadets at the sheriff’s academy. This is the same CAIR that recently posted a flyer on its own website urging Muslims to slam the door on FBI agents asking for information.

We’re told that the White House lobbied for testimony from Baca, who has decried what he calls “this constant uninformed chatter about religion being a factor in terrorism.” But why give him Day One billing?

….King’s staff [does highlight] other witnesses, including the uncle of a radicalized young Muslim who’ll testify his Minneapolis mosque instructed members not to cooperate with FBI investigators. While powerful, the public needs to also hear from law enforcement officials working such cases. (Interestingly, Ellison defended that same pro-jihad mosque.)

They have told the press that outreach to Muslim leaders more often than not proves a one-way street. About the only information investigators ever get involves complaints of “hate crimes,” not tips about jihadists.

“Many FBI officers have grown impatient with what they see as Muslim resistance,” the Washington Post reported in a front-page story published in 2007. “The Muslims are ‘in denial’ over the threat in their midst, one senior officer said, adding: ‘All they say is “There is no problem. Stop picking on us.”‘” Of course, homegrown Muslim terrorism is a major problem, with dozens more cases emerging since that article ran.

Islamist groups and leaders are shuddering over the prospect of King outing them on national TV. That’s why they’ve tried to shut down the hearings.

But their Democrat co-conspirators are running just as scared. The true nature and scope of the threat from radical Islam that they’ve worked so tirelessly to filter out from public view could finally break out into the open and make them look very bad.

King can’t cave to their demands. If he’s going to do this, he has to go all the way. That means producing witnesses who are authorities, not just citizens or activists, and can back up his charges with first-hand evidence.

Before we blame King for not “going all the way,” consider this from the New York Daily News story first cited in this post:

But even some anti-terrorism cops are worried that King’s push could backfire — by making moderate Muslims feel they are being scapegoated [thereby making them] more vulnerable to anti-American propaganda.

“When people hear ‘witch hunt,’ that can’t be good for us,” said an NYPD source.

King said he is aware he is treading on perilous ground and that an insensitive comment by a Homeland Security Committee member could be twisted into “official American policy” in jihadist propaganda.

Congressman King is doing his best to tread a razor-thin line not of his making. On one side, people such as the readers of this blog, who want him to do more — much more — to expose the terrifying extent to which shariah-promoters have infiltrated not only U.S. mosques, but our prison system, police forces, homeland security apparatus, military, universities, media, and local and national governments. On the other side, people – including in the federal government – from whom even mentioning the word “Islamic” in the same sentence as “terrorist” provokes raving hysteria. And indeed, King has been getting death threats from that side.

As anti-shariah patriots, though, we need to keep up the heat on Congressman King, while doing everything we can to support him in pressing forward into dangerous territory.

Along with calling your own Congressman, please keep Rep. Peter King and the other members and staff of his Homeland Security Committee in your prayers.